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by chimeracoder 4686 days ago
> Problem #3 - Too high of a threshold for funding.

I looked at this and had the opposite reaction. $50K is between 50 and 75% of a full-time developer's salary in NYC for a single year (I believe it's similar in SF). Are we expected to believe that that's all it would take to get Cocoa libraries running seamlessly on GNU?

Granted, I've never dealt with Cocoa at all, so maybe I'm overestimating this, but it seems like a lot of work.

I mean, how can you take a 15-year, multi-person project, and then assume it's going to be completed with a single person-year[0]?

[0] I don't mean literally a single person - I'm referring to a person-year being a unit of "work" (ie, the theoretical work equivalent of one person for a year).
4 comments
_delirium 4686 days ago
I'm also skeptical, but I think the comparison with regular dev salaries overestimates the money that would be needed, at least for some projects. There are many volunteer contributors to open-source projects who would be willing to move to working on them full-time, or at least more-time, for much less than market rate. For example one of the SBCL devs did a lot of work on the compiler for only $16k (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sbcl-threading-2011), and the Git-Annex Assistant guy worked on it for a whole year for $25k (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...).

Granted, if you have to hire devs not already part of your project at market rate, things will go way up from that.

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rsynnott 4686 days ago
> Are we expected to believe that that's all it would take to get Cocoa libraries running seamlessly on GNU?

That's not what the project plans to do. Apple's implementation of Cocoa isn't open-source. GNUStep already has large parts of the Cocoa APIs implemented, but they're very outdated. I think fixing this on $50k is extremely ambitious, but note that the project says they'll be brought up to at least 10.6 (which would be good enough to allow easy ports of a lot of Mac software), not all the way to 10.9.

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visualR 4686 days ago
I think GNUStep already implements the public Cocoa SDK for 10.4. Though I still think the jump to 10.6 will take longer than a year, if that means supporting Core Data, GCD, bindings, etc.
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chrisdevereux 4686 days ago
Ok then, let's add problem #4 - Too low a threshold for funding.

That is a problem.

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